“Non –Observance of Grice’s Maxims in Humorous Interactions: The case of (Melon City Show)”

Humor has long been an important factor in daily communication. It is especially important in situation comedy. It is occasionally employed to improve the utterances and to make them more pleasant and comfortable. Many scholars tried to investigate humor from different points of view. The association between humor and cooperative principles (CP) opened the door for pragmatic studies on verbal humor. Grice proposed the cooperative maxims principles, which may can be used to analyze conversations. The current study selects the non-observing of four maxims of Grice in the Iraqi show “Melon City Show” (Wilayat Batikh). The present study hypothesizes that non- observing of Grice’s four maxims can and humor in Iraqi discourse. For this purpose (3) excerpts from “Melon City Show” were randomly chosen and analyzed. The present study aims to identify instances of breaking four maxims to make humor. Also, it aims to find the most broken maxim in this regard, The findings of this study show that among the five kinds of non-observance of Grice's four maxims, flouting is the most regularly utilized to produce humor in Iraqi comedies. In addition, the study has found that the most flouted maxim by Iraqi people is the quality maxim; while the most violated one is the quantity maxim. Thus, it has been concluded that creating humor by non-observing Grice’s maxims is applicable to the Iraqi Arabic discourse.